Rakudo Star Release 2014.04

2014-05-05

A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the April 2014 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the April 2014 release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/. A Windows .MSI version of Rakudo star will usually appear in the downloads area shortly after the tarball release.

This is the first Rakudo Star release with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with experimental support for the JVM backend (some module tests fail).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2014.04 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 6.1.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, version 2014.04 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Some of the new features added to this release include:

experimental support for the JVM and MoarVM backends

NativeCall passes all its tests on all backends

S17 (concurrency) now in MoarVM (except timing related features)

winner { more @channels { ... } } now works

implemented univals(), .unival and .univals (on MoarVM)

added .minpairs/.maxpairs on (Set|Bag|Mix)Hash

Naive implementation of "is cached" trait on Routines

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include:

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in the release tarball.